


all that noise, and all that sound (all those places i got found)

by commonemergency



Category: Dan Howell & Phil Lester - Fandom, Phan, dan howell/phil lester - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universes, Love, M/M, Multiple Universe, Romance, Unrequited Love, no actual jumping of universes just a discussion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-19
Updated: 2017-07-19
Packaged: 2018-12-04 04:13:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11547258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commonemergency/pseuds/commonemergency
Summary: “Maybe anything that can happen -- does. And maybe we just happen to exist in the many series of happenings that were necessary for us to exist,”Phil comes with Dan to Wokingham to celebrate his mum's birthday, but they end up talking about the different universes that they may or may not exist in.





	all that noise, and all that sound (all those places i got found)

**Author's Note:**

> The quote in the description is basically a gist of the lecture i watched on quantum physics & multiple universes theory okay. Basically how this story happened: I went to work, and when I got out of work my best friends ended up going to a Bruno Mars concert and I was sad so I went to get dinner and ended up thinking about the possibility of different universes and I wondered if there was a universe where I ended up going and somehow thought of Dan and Phil. I don't know. 
> 
> Loosely based off that one time Phil went to Wokingham with Dan for his mum's birthday.

“I wonder if there are universes out there where we don’t make it,” Dan wonders at night, they’re at his parents house in Wokingham for his mother’s birthday. Between them there’s a bottle of malibu that’s halfway gone and smirnoff. The patio has chairs still out from the party earlier and Dan needed some fresh air, although it was nearing one o’clock in the morning. Phil only came out because Dan had. By now he knows that it’s mostly the alcohol talking but he kind of likes discussing these kind of topics and if he was being honest he missed talking to Dan like this. 

“What do you mean?” Phil did bring a blanket out though and he’s wrapped himself in it. Dan had noticed and offered the bottle of malibu for him to drink. He says that the alcohol would help warm him up. 

Dan wants to say: _if there are universes where you and I don’t end up together._

“I mean, just…. What are the other Dan and Phil’s doing?” He takes the last bit of smirnoff and sets the bottle down by his feet and he can feel the cool air, and he knows that when they eventually do go back inside his cheeks will be as red as a tomato. 

“Doing Dan and Phil things,” Phil suggests with a small laugh. 

“Obviously, I just want to know _what exactly,_ ”

It’s a question that Dan thinks about a lot. It’s something that keeps him up at night. What dan and Phil are doing in these other universes, if it were real. When Dan and Phil first met they used to talk a lot about this. And they would theorize and make word documents and put those theories in those documents and send it to each other to add if they wanted to. And they’d tell their friends about it and no one would understand other than Dan and Phil because in the grand scheme of things before any of that would happen -- they’d probably be dead but that didn’t mean they couldn’t talk about it. 

They’d create what they _wanted_ to be.

“Remember when we used to talk about this?” Phil brings the bottle up to his lips and hands it to Dan. 

He smiles a little and nods his head. “Yeah.” 

Dan had thought that in one universe they were both astronauts discovering galaxies together. 

Phil had replied back that in another universe they were zookeepers. 

Dan had criticized that it was cool but not that spectacular. 

Because Dan in all these universes they created wanted to be something. And he wanted to be something important. Whereas Phil was content being farmers, vets, a dog walker in one, and a snake handler in another. 

And then there were the universes where they invented time machines, they could agree on that one. Dan wanted to go back in the past and change things, where Phil just wanted to replay that one moment that had meant something to him. 

“I sat in a quantum physics lecture once. My friend had known that I took an interest in it and I remember the professor saying, _“Maybe anything that can happen -- does. And maybe we just happen to exist in the many series of happenings that were necessary for us to exist,”_ He said that it’s easy to add philosophy when we’re talking about multiple universes and quantum physics and to not get it confused.” Dan brings the bottle to his lips and his head is light. He feels light and he wants to lay down. 

When Dan looks over at Phil they’re still- and they stare at the other for a long time, and Phil was beginning to think of that paradox, “ _an unstoppable force meets an immovable object,_ ” because that’s what Dan felt like sometimes. He was so far away and immovable when he wanted to be when all Phil wanted to be was close. He can’t complain much -- at the end of the day Phil is the person that Dan talks to but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt sometimes. 

The alcohol is getting to him because he’s getting overly emotional about it. 

“I just want to be happy in all of them,” Phil eventually blurts out. 

Dan’s face is unreadable. 

Phil liked to think that they’d find each other in each universe. He liked to think that no matter what happened, whether fate or coincidence they’d find each other in these universes and whether that first contact had any weight behind it and they became something at least they knew about the other and that’s how Phil knows that it’s real. He was not the kind to think in grand romantics when it came to people but there was something about Dan that made him _feel._ In all the universes they imaginatively traveled he’d still want to find Dan in all of them. 

He knows that it’s inevitable that in these universes they don’t work out. Phil knows that maybe the one that they’re in now is possibly that. 

There are universes where they don’t work out, and they don’t make it, and they fall apart, and Dan moves back to Wokingham and Phil moves to a smaller apartment in Manchester, and they fall back into old patterns that were recently forgotten about and they remember it like they remember an old friend. They live their lives and go out and meet new people and go on poor dates and have one night stands that don’t mean much. 

There are universes where they’ve never met online and Dan and Phil bump into each other at a grocery store. They’re getting milk and it’s not magical and there’s no gravitational pull towards the other. It’s just a moment that’ll easily be forgotten in an hour. They say ‘ _excuse me_ ’ in this universe and they go to different tills and then it’s gone. 

There are the universes where they met in the war, and there are the universes where they were next door neighbours that didn’t get along, there are universes where one witnesses the other die by car accident and they were just a bystander, and there are universes where they just walk passed the other on the street in London and they’re just nothing but a face for one single second. No one looks back. 

“You know what’s crazy to me?” Phil asks, he’s looking for shooting stars but he hasn’t seen one yet. Wokingham was a lot quieter than London and you could actually see the sky out here, there was a bit of disappointment in not being able to catch a shooting star. 

“What Phil?” Dan’s hand is dangling in the open space between their two chairs and his fingers brush up against Phil’s before he ends up just holding his hand. 

“Timezones,”

“Don’t start,” They’ve had this conversation before and Dan laughs. 

With their fingers intertwined with the other Dan thinks of those universes where they do end up together. Because they are each moment; they’re the smile on Phil’s face when he’s holding their child for the first time, they are the moment that Phil goes in for the first kiss in a vineyard in Italy, they are also the sadness that first winter morning when Dan decides to leave, they are the bus trips to Wales to visit Phil’s grandparents to tell them they’re getting married and they’re smiles and laughter and tears of all those other tiny moments in between, but most importantly, they are here and now and right now this is where Dan wants to be. 

“I’m too drunk to think about the fact that there’s a child being born at one side of the earth while at the same time another child being born on the opposite side of the earth and still being older,”

“I don’t think that made sense with how you said it Dan, but I still got it,”

They look at each other again and laugh. 

In many universes Dan and Phil don’t work out. 

But maybe, just maybe, they will in this one.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments/Kudos appreciated! 
> 
> talk to me on tumblr/twitter @nihilismdan


End file.
